Chapter Three
Nomad
“Hey there,” Lynx’s voice was cheerful as she spoke with her phone on speaker. “Dawson, quick question for you. If I’m remembering correctly, you’re a big World War II munitions history buff.”
“I am.” He chuckled. “It sounds like you have your teeth in a new puzzle.”
“I have an idea tickling around my brain. Do you have a minute? Could you walk up the hall and let me ask you a couple of questions?”
“I do. Give me five.”
“Perfect.” As she hung up the phone, she turned to Nomad and White. “Dawson Hughs, Tidal Force.”
Nomad gave a nod. he assumed that was another tactical unit like Strike Force.
Lynx lifted the phone and pressed a single number from a quick-dial roster. She slid her shoes off and started pacing barefoot as the rings came through the speaker.
Nomad noticed White’s body tense with anticipation. In the car, White had said that when Lynx’s shoes came off, that was a sign that she was onto something good.
“Hey, Baby Girl,” a gravelly voice answered.
“Stan, hey there, you’re on speaker phone. I have two associates here in my office. If you have a sec, I wanted to go over a memory I had of ghost stories around the campfire.”
“Shoot.”
Lynx paused and looked down at her pink-pedicured toes.
“We had a bonfire going. There was a kid there, I think his name was Timmy. He’d been eating wild berries all day, and the juices had stained his skin.
One of the men told him that the berry stains were permanent, that he was going to be a blue boy forevermore.
And then they started to sing ‘Little Boy Blue.’”
“That was Joe’s boy, Timmy. He cried for an hour after that. But I think it was ’cause he had a belly ache from too many berries and not from us teasing him.”
“Yeah, as I remember it, he was pretty sick. After he went to his tent, someone brought up the Blue Fugates in Appalachia with an unusual blood disorder that made their skin look blue.”
“Methemoglobinemia.”
“See, I knew you’d remember the weird medical stuff,” she said. “That’s what I want to ask you about. You told us that the disorder wasn’t the oddest you’d studied. You said that in the eighteen hundreds, there were people who glowed in the dark.”
“True story. And if they glowed, they died. It was from working with white phosphorus.”
Lynx scuffed a foot back and forth along the carpet. “Why did that end in the eighteen hundreds?”
“People died by working with it, so eventually white phosphorus was outlawed around the turn of the 20th century. It went the way of eating off pewter plates or using mercury in hat making, arsenic in green wallpaper.”
“Those were dangerous times. So white phosphorus could make someone glow in the dark? Yes, that’s the story I remember you telling. But there was more to it. And I’m wondering if I can tell you some odd attributes to a man that I’ve been studying and have you weigh in?”
“I’ll give it my best shot,” the man said.
“I observed an individual, and I believe he was quite ill. Here are the signs I saw in no particular order.”
“Hang on, let me grab a pencil.”
“Stan,” Lynx said with the hint of mother-scold in her voice.
“I’ll shred and eat it when I’m done talking to you.”
Lynx laughed.
“Okay, shoot,” Stan said, and Nomad could feel the bubble of excitement in his belly. Had Lynx picked up on an illness? There was the one guy with a cast, but that was because Red had beaten him with an iron skillet at the ball.
“One, the man was running. But when he ran, he was rather stiff. He wasn’t limping, but more how I’ve seen my Nona Sophia walk when she developed peripheral neuropathy in her feet, high-stepping and rather robotic.”
“Got it.”
“Two, he had oddly rust colored hair. It didn’t match his skin tone.
Kind of brassy, almost neon, he was trying to hide under his skull cap.
But I saw a picture of him without the hat, and it was quite odd.
Again, in the setting where that picture was taken, it was quite high-end, so he could well have been sporting the newest hairstyle from Japan or something. ”
“Yup.”
“I have five of these observations in total. I’m putting numbers three and four together. He got punched in the jaw, and the puncher said it felt like a bag of aquarium gravel instead of bone. When his mouth opened, the air filled with the scent of garlic.”
“Huh.”
“And lastly, I saw a picture of the man, taken while he was in a vehicle at night with streetlights nearby. It was captured by an earring camera, so take it with a grain of salt, but I swear it looked like the guy had a faint glow around the front of his face. In the picture, he was knocked out cold, so his mouth hung slack.”
“Well, that hits the highlights. Sounds like your guy has phossy jaw. And he’s probably going to die soon.”
White jutted forward. Her eyes were intense.
“Can you tell me more?” Lynx asked.
“What you're describing are hallmarks of phosphorus necrosis of the jaw. That comes from chronic, low-level exposure to white phosphorus rather than someone getting a full whack. A full whack would have killed him a long time back. Almost instantly, in fact.”
“So what does that mean? How does it come about?” White called out. “Oh, hey, Stan. Thanks for helping us with our little mystery. I’m one of Baby Girl’s associates.” She sent a teasing wink toward Lynx.
Stan’s chuckle was a chesty rumble. “No problem. A chance to geek out about weird historical illnesses makes it a good day. For me, anyway. Not so much for the phossy jaw guy. To answer your question, white phosphorus is lipid-soluble, which means it dissolves easily in human tissue. It goes into the body and halts the bone-rebuilding process in osteoblasts. So bone is broken down by osteoclasts, and normally the osteoblasts build it back, right?”
“Right,” Lynx said as she wandered over to her chair and sat with her phone held out for all to hear. “That explains the brittle bones crushing under a strong blow.”
“But this is a 19th-century problem,” Nomad said.
“How do you do, sir? Thank you for your expertise. I’m the second of—” He’d almost said Lynx, but that was a call sign, and perhaps Stan didn’t know that she used that name at work.
Nomad didn’t know her real name, and he didn’t have White’s familiarity with the woman to tease her with the obviously familial nickname "Baby Girl," a nickname from a man who had known her since she was a child. “I’m the second of the associates.” He offered a bit lamely.
“Mainly, that’s true. However, you’d be wrong to say it hasn’t shown up over the last hundred and twenty years.
WWI and WWII, for example, white phosphorus was used by Allied troops as a multi-purpose tool—smoke screens, location marking, and incendiary weapons.
Dangerous stuff. Phosphorus spontaneously combusts when it comes into contact with air and burns at 1,500° Fahrenheit.
You’ll see photographs of the men from time to time who worked with the white phosphorus and got phossy jaw.
You can guess at the cause of their disfigurement because the only way to try to save someone would be to remove their jaw. And even then, there’s no guarantee.”
“Horrible,” Lynx said. “How long would that take, would you say, to develop phossy jaw, Stan?”
“Timeline? Okay, well, if this is someone you’ve encountered and punched, that makes the exposure time a little harder. For the most part, off the top of my head, it would take years—two or three of poorly ventilated exposure before it was visibly a problem.”
“That long, hey?” Nomad asked. Dead end.
“You didn’t see a problem, though, right?” Stan asked.
“Orange hair sticking out of his cap, awkward gait, the tiniest hint of glow in the dark, possibly. But then the spark that had me recall your story was the garlic breath and shattered jaw,” Lynx said.
“There’s a thing they call the seeping phase, and you can get all those symptoms at that time. The glow and the garlic breath occur well before the bone deformity. Someone punched him, right? That’s what deformed his jaw.”
“Yes, sir,” Nomad said.
“Were his eyes jaundiced-looking?” Stan asked.
“I’ll go back and check if any of the images are clear enough to tell,” Lynx said.
“How long would the exposure be for the glowing garlic breath to be present?” White asked.
“Six months to a year, depending on the person and the environment, is my best guess,” Stan said.
“There are a lot of ‘depends on’ going on here, genetics, frequency, and duration of exposure, too much for me to give you a better idea. Six to twelve months should cover most of the symptoms you described. And there’s nothing else that I know of that gives your breath a chemiluminescent glow and makes you stink of garlic.
Garlic breath alone could be a toxin like selenium, tellurium, or even arsenic poisoning. ”
“I’m pretty sure I saw glowing breath. And once you’re out of that environment, do things begin to reverse?” Lynx asked.
“No, that kind of poisoning becomes a chronic condition. Sure, he’ll start feeling better. His lung irritation will subside, but the phossy jaw is unstoppable. It’s a chain reaction.”
There was a knock at the Strike Force War Room door. “Stan, I’m going to open the door for associate number three.”